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“We actually have three sides here,” says Zhanna Bezpiatchuk, a Kyiv correspondent for RFE/RL, who watched the escalation of the protests against Yanukovych for months. “There are the parliamentary factions, the government and the Maidan civil society with a number of groups and initiatives.

“What we have after two months of government inaction and lack of dialogue is a hardening of the mood, absence of rule of law and absence of justice. The parliamentary opposition doesn’t control Maidan.”

There was initial hope that news of the truce could cool the crowd. But many in the square were no longer listening to the lawmakers. They were angry that the Parliament failed to immediately launch crucial talks on constitutional change to limit sweeping presidential powers, regarding it as another failed promise.

None of the three MPs in the headlines has become a rallying point for the protests.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a bespectacled lawyer, economist and former government minister, lacks the charisma of his imprisoned party leader, Yulia Tymoshenko. Oleh Tyahnybok of the far right Freedom Party — a surgeon and ultra-nationalist politician — is too extreme for some on the right. And Vitali Klitschko, a pro-European former boxer and presidential hopeful who is the most high profile of the three, has scored no political knockouts to date.

“None of them has support close to 20 per cent, and none is ready to recognize the others,” says Serhiy Kudelia of Baylor University in Texas. “There’s a power vacuum on both sides.”

“This is an uprising that is not controlled by anybody,” says Dominique Arel, chair of Ukrainian studies at the University of Ottawa. “It makes it inherently difficult to channel political demands.”

Nor are there any obvious protest leaders or an apparent central command. “Part of what’s happening in the protests is driven by social media,” says Joshua Tucker of New York University, who monitors political protest movements. “When everything broke loose (Wednesday) there was an enormous spike in Twitter users. People come out on the street co-ordinated by social media. I don’t know the extent to which a formal movement is operating in Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, Yanukovych himself is losing his grip on both rebellious western Ukraine and his own supporters.

Although he is “completely in charge of the forces in the ground in a totally centralized system,” says Arel, “the president doesn’t control four provinces or what is happening in the protests.”

And, he says, “for the first time we’ve seen a real defection in the ranks (within Yanukovych’s ruling party in parliament). He could lose control over parliament.”

But the most worrying development for Yanukovych — and Ukraine — is the seizure of power by protesters in the western regions, whose unofficial capital is Lviv. They have attacked government security and police ministries, burnt and sacked them, and captured large amounts of weapons.

Security service chief Oleksandr Yakimenko said in a statement that “in many regions of the country, municipal buildings, offices of the interior ministry, state security and the prosecutor general, army units and arms depots are being seized.”

“It’s a decentralized uprising,” said Kudelia. “They created self-running authorities. Western Ukraine is now outside the realm of central government control.”

None of this bodes well for a swift resolution of what has become an increasingly bloody struggle. In this zero-sum game, there are worst case predictions of a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown, which could spark a catastrophic escalation of violence and civil strife.

Western pressure on Yanukovych to step down is unlikely to succeed unless he were offered safe passage out of the country and immunity from prosecution. But, says Arel, there is a more positive possibility.

“Yanukovych built a majority (in parliament) by questionable means. If that changes and he is forced out by his own people, it would be the best scenario.”

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